Chuck Hogan - The Killing Moon - A Novel

The proof of this was that he had never lost focus since that long weekend. Not once. Every step since then, every move he had made, only brought him closer to his goal. Buying fuel, tubing, and glassware to outfit the old curing shack in back, then later the camper. He started off buying up Sudafed for the pseudoephedrine, and he still had Wanda clear out the Gulp whenever they got in a new shipment. But his search for a reliable, local source of iodine had led him to the fruity vet Dr. Bolt and a genius solution. He ordered road flares by the case for the red phosphorous they contained, and then it was on to the cook.

Cold medicine and household poisons cooked to a powder. That’s all it was. Easy to bake as chocolate chip cookies, Ibbits told him. Problem was, Bucky had never baked chocolate chip cookies in his life.

But he learned. How to vent the shed so that the fumes didn’t get to him. How to dip the flares in acetone, loosening up the phosphorous for scraping. How to tube out the dope. How gourmet coffee filters worked better than the cheaper, no-name brand.

Internet recipes are all bunk, Ibbits had declared. The Man had gotten to them somehow. The cook sites that turned up at the top of the big search engines directed you straight to the Drug Enforcement Agency and registered your computer number. Lots of disinformation out there. And even if you did stumble upon a good recipe, it would be like trying to follow a chef on one of those TV cooking shows where they have all the time-consuming stuff prepared ahead of the taping. Sometimes, in the boredom of a cook, Bucky imagined he was before a TV camera, taking viewers through the process. Showing them his hot plate and mason jars and Pyrex bowls all set up on the counter. Gallon jugs of muriatic acid and Coleman’s fuel, cans of Red Devil lye. Him donning his mask and gloves, and, as he boiled and filtered, the studio audience pruning up their noses at the bitter smell.

He tested his batches on Wanda. She was his willing lab bunny. Through her he introduced it into the margins of this marginal town — teenagers, mostly, some rats she had met at the Gulp — test-marketing the product, rolling it out slowly. It was everything Ibbits said it would be and more. Bucky’s stockpile grew as he awaited the right moment to release his stores full bore to the public. Then he would watch meth spread like a contagion, consuming its consumers, his own personal army of zombies marching forth, the drug spreading, spreading, and the money riding up the pyramid to the source at the top.

Other opportunists would soon vie for the attention of this new class of customers he was creating — and let them. Let them take over the risk and the blame. Because by then he would have made his wad. Already, he was sitting on about $100,000 worth of product. He would play it out until the moment felt right, and then ditch this used-up town for good. Turn it over to Eddie, let him pick his ass in that run-down station, in a town full of the undead. Let him preside over the final throes of Meth Falls, Massachusetts. Bucky would be down in Daytona, retired at age twenty-six in the land of spring break and NASCAR, wet-T-shirt nights and fat-boy Harleys and fun in the fuckin’ sun. College honeys, not the country bush he saw here. Party girls looking for a man with money to spend and maybe a little meth to get them off. Why not dabble, set up a little lab behind his mansion pool house, keep his hand in? This magic dust was his ticket to the world.

This was all part of his pregame ritual, how he got himself fired up to head back out and cook up another hot batch. He was minting money out there, and soon, very soon, he would be able to start throwing some of it around.

He was already at the back door when the front bell went off. Wanda knew he didn’t like her coming up here uninvited. She was getting more and more strung out, but he couldn’t cut her off now. A sixteenth of a gram was all it took to keep her happy. If only she knew how valuable she was to him. If only she knew how much bank he was going to make off her skinny ass.

He was grinning to himself and chewing the last bit of bologna toast when he opened the door.

Pinty is dead.

That was Maddox’s first thought as he approached the central station on Pinty’s floor, seeing the duty nurse waiting to intercept him.

Instead, she said, “He’s been asking for you.”

Inside Pinty’s room, the dying plant the town had sent over had been moved to the windowsill in a last-ditch effort to revive it. Pinty was asleep, his mouth tube gone, the oxygen line still under his nose. Maddox reached for his left hand where it lay curled across his chest.

Muscles tugged at Pinty’s cheeks. His lifting eyebrows signaled a tectonic shift, and his eyes rolled open.

Maddox waited for Pinty to find him there.

“Greggy,” Pinty said. He was hoarse and stiff-jawed from sleep and the tube.

“Pinty,” said Maddox. “It’s me. It’s Donny.”

Pinty stared, trying to make him real. Trying to make him his son. “Greggy.”

So Maddox just nodded, holding his hand until he went out again. Pinty’s cold fingers were rigid, locked in a curl. Maddox realized they were palsied from the stroke.

He stayed with him awhile, but Pinty remained asleep.

Later, on his way back out through the emergency room lobby, he saw an ambulance unloading a woman on a stretcher, the accident victim clutching her handbag and trying to talk on her mobile phone with a bandage wrapped around her head.

The EMTs wheeling her in were the same two who had reported to Black Falls the night of the teenagers’ car wreck. Maddox watched them go, then followed them inside the ambulance entrance, getting an idea.

He found a woman reading a fat paperback behind the service window. He showed her his badge — the jersey alone wouldn’t do it — and asked for the release forms from that night, giving her the accident date and location. “Two minors,” he explained. “We have some property we need to return to them.”

She clicked keys on her computer with long, jeweled nails, eyeing Maddox while the pages printed silently behind her. A Portuguese woman with dark eyes and a broad nose. Line-thin eyebrows and a faint scar beneath her left ear, riding over her jaw. She handed him the copies and said, “You don’t remember me.”

Maddox went cold.

She said, “You’re wearing a uniform now.”

Lowell, he remembered. Eight years ago. Her name would come to him. Her hospital ID was on her belt, too low for him to read.

She said, “I was Bobby Omar’s girl.”

She was alone inside the window, and there was no one in the hallway within earshot. She seemed as interested in keeping this private as he was.

Maddox said, “I didn’t recognize you.”

“You haven’t changed. Much.”

He had to be careful. So many different ways this could go. “I guess Bobby’s upstate now?”

“I guess so.”

“You don’t visit?”

She shook her head, earrings tinkling.

“Glad to hear it,” he said.

“He trusted you, you know. He always said he was never sure about the others, never sure about anyone. Even me. Why he kept that wolf on a chain in our crib. But he was sure about you. Mad Dog Maddox.”

She seemed to mean this as a compliment. Maddox folded and refolded the pages in his hands, stopping once he realized he was doing so.

“It was a lifetime ago,” she said. “Who I was then. The anger I had for everything, for everyone. I was in so deep.” She looked away, curling her tongue. “I’m out here with my sister and her husband now. I have this job. I’m dating one of the drivers.”

He sensed her eagerness, her need for his approval.